For a Handful of Feathers

by Jim Harrison

  Bill and I began by removing miles of old barbed wire (usually embedded into trees, etc.), but faced with the logistics of more than two hundred acres of unwanted grass, I hired a professional to spray the fields with herbicides. I despise chemicals more than I do Bos taurus primigenius (cows), but my choices were limited; untended Pensacola grass grows so thick that except during the nesting season no sensible quail would think of navigating beyond its edges for fear of a terminal anxiety attack.

  Another tractor arrived, this time pulling a five-hundred-gallon herbicide sprayer soon to be filled with a mixture of Roundup, mineral oil (to help the Roundup stick to the grass), and water. For a day and a half it crisscrossed the fields and pastures at a set speed, booms extended like the wings of a toy plane, discharging at forty pounds of pressure per acre gallons of misty poison and killing every living plant in its path. Or so I thought. A week later, the blue-green fields of April had turned brown: ungulate brown.

  We were then advised to harrow and cross-harrow the sprayed fields, which we did ad nauseam, to finely chop what was left of the roots. Back and forth we harrowed for hundreds of hours, back and forth across the brown earth, feeling nothing—the mind set in that terminal condition of cruise control that is familiar to farmers the world over—cutting the fields into minute herringbones until all the furrows were straight and the earth powder-soft.

  As if that weren’t enough, three of the toughest fields were completely turned upside down by Bill and his bottom plows, two enormous pieces of steel that stand like upside-down shark fins and dig so deep they flip angleworms into the maws of waiting crows. These great chunks of earth were left to bake for two months and then had to be painfully harrowed smooth again. A year later, 80 percent of the Pensacola Bahia grass was back.

  Meanwhile, smudges of Bermuda grass started showing up in the two-hundred-acre field. By harrowing-in food plots and planting pine trees, the mat grass that had been shadowed by corn for years was making a strong comeback, in effect thanking us for reintroducing it to the sun. A rainy season later, broad patches the size of basketball courts slinked across the field like fungus, and if Pensacola Bahia grass discourages quail, Bermuda grows so rank it discourages even my dogs.

  This time we bought our own sprayer, the chemicals and oil to fill it, nuked the Bahia all over again, and tried spot-killing the worst patches of Bermuda. We hoped that what evolved behind the chemicals would shade what grass we didn’t kill. The nightmare continued as what came up were tall, dense stands of coffee weeds and nothing else. Back into the fields we went, this time loaded with 2, 4-D amine, a carcinogenic chemical that only kills broadleaf plants. Bill wore a mask, goggles, and a suit that made his life, inside of it, hell. Six weeks later, Johnson grass (not a favorite of quail but at least attractive to me), sand spurs, and Crotalaria popped out of the exhausted earth. One year later the Bermuda grass was back.

  I have always hated ungulates for the cavalier manner in which they were allowed to eat so much of the West; now I hate them for what they did to this land. As for the herbicides, I have put most of this chemical nightmare to rest. It would take years of spraying to undo what was planted in good faith for reasons other than my own, and since I no longer plan to spend all my efforts producing a quail utopia, I have restructured my burning program. I’ll burn some problem areas later, when the grass has started to grow, in effect stunting it and retarding its development. In other problem areas I won’t burn at all for three or four years, effectively promoting a hardwood growth that will shade out or certainly diversify the mat grasses. In the winter I harrow small fields within larger fields, turning under the areas where the Bermuda grass grows rankest and planting them in winter wheat and clover, in effect retarding the noxious growth with a source of spring food and summer nesting cover.

  I thought for a while that I could return to this land its original plants and native grasses, the same vegetation that thrived during the tenure of the Lower Creek Indians. That will not happen. Cow fodder, imported into the country as a solution to a problem (not really all that different from what I do when I plant Kobe Lespedeza or Egyptian wheat), whipped my ass. The best I can hope for is that the natural progression of weeds will come and go with the seasons until one day, five or ten years down the road, the fields will climax in broom sedge and shade out the grass. The real value of broom sedge to quail will be as nesting sites and escape cover, and it is amusing to note that soon after the sedge waves tall and golden in the autumn winds it will be time to plow huge chunks of it back into the ground, which will enervate the weeds and hardwoods and jump-start the process all over again.

  X

  Spring burning followed later by harrowing, before the quail settle onto their nests, are two of the best things a landowner (as long as his land isn’t infested with invading mat-type grasses) can do for quail short of planting food and cover. Disturbing the soil promotes legumes and adds miles of new edges for the birds to hug. A man can mount his tractor for a Sunday promenade, drop the harrow and meander through his woods to his heart’s content, and do wonders for his game population. If he feels flush, he can spread a little slag or lime on these newly cut trails and six months later retrace his steps by following the lush new growth.

  The first year, Buckner had us plant bicolor Lespedeza and plum trees, Lespedeza as a permanent and first-year cover as well as a food source, and plum thickets as a long-range (four- to ten-year) additional food and roosting cover. Both plants grow thick and shade out the ground. This allows their seeds to fall on bare dirt, an energy-saving and reliable method of presenting food to quail, a must in fields that we knew would draw rodents to the grain and raptors to the rodents; fields that would offer very little cover until the pine trees gained stature. We needed as much cover as possible, because it made no sense to draw bobwhites to food simply to feed them to the hawks.

  The year-old Lespedeza seedlings were planted on prepared ground in long, narrow 12-by-250-foot strips close to the pine seedlings, and by summer’s end quail had taken up residence under their canopies of loose flowering heads. The plum trees were planted by hand as seedlings in groups of fifteen or twenty at the head of each Lespedeza strip. For reasons of managerial continuity, in July we planted rows of sorghum for food and cover, parallel to and about the same size as the Lespedeza patches, so that the coveys could navigate from food to cover with minimum exposure to predation. With very few birds on the property we encouraged optimum habitat in a minimum time span. In all, we planted seventy-two Lespedeza plots—eighteen in the woods, the rest in the fields—for a total of five thousand seedlings. The plum tree total came to one hundred and twenty.

  The losses that first year were low in the Lespedeza patches, but heavy in the plum department, mainly as a result of what is becoming characteristic in northern Florida and southern Georgia: a drought that lasted forty-one days and a sun that regularly spun the needle of the tractor-mounted thermometer to 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

  We also broadcast brown-top millet on the edges of the roads and planted corn in two ten-acre dove fields and five smaller patches (two acres each) in the open pastures. By law I was not allowed to harvest the grain, as I was being paid not to, but I did anyway, not to sell but to turn out later as a supplement to the deer, turkey, and quail’s winter diet. The brown-top offered cover, seeds, and excellent bugging grounds on which the young quail could test their skills. The corn offered tall cover, and of course food until January. We also planted rows of Kobe Lespedeza and broad patches of partridge peas, the former being an accessible annual in terms of cash outlay, the latter being a very expensive perennial. The results were dismal with the former and excellent with the latter. The partridge peas did so well (planted in full sunlight) that I plan to buy a small quantity of seeds over the next four or five years to assure their permanence both as a source of food and for the visual delight of yellow August blooms.

  The most interesting article I have read about quail food is “The Value of a See
d,” written by Fred S. Guthery, a research scientist at the Kleberg Institute in Texas. Guthery breaks down the caloric value of the quail’s more common foods and compares that value to the effort expended in finding the food and to the quantity of seeds it takes to keep a bird alive. Assuming it takes sixty calories of usable energy to keep a bobwhite healthy for one day, here are some of the equations: A bird would have to eat 18,639 common Lespedeza seeds, or 3,605 of my colorful partridge peas, or 1,160 common sunflower seeds, 666 grain sorghum, 648 wheat, 103 soybeans, or 41 kernels of corn. If we take common Lespedeza as an example, and if the bird ate one seed every two seconds, it would take ten hours for it to eat enough to maintain its body weight. Guthery points out that a larger seed usually contains more calories than a small one, so, given a choice, it makes sense to plant food plots that bear large seeds rich in oil. Corn is expensive in terms of time and labor to plant, but as a food source or as a supplement in feeders it cannot be beat.

  During the first twelve months of owning the farm, we turned a piece of real estate on which corn was grown in one field, hay was cut in the others, and the woods were burned on the remainder every year for appearance’s sake, into a wildlife food mill. By doing so we fed thousands of nongame species. We doubled the coveys of quail, greatly enhanced the number of young turkeys, and drew white-tailed deer from every direction. That year I harvested a token eight quail for the pot. I’m not sure if my discretion in the matter helped—I think I could have killed three times that many birds and still doubled my coveys. In biological terms, in contrast to the food and cover we sowed, this temperate harvest meant nothing; in terms of making me feel good, it meant a lot.

  XI

  May 28, 1991

  A six-foot alligator climbed out of the ditch next to Old Bam-bridge Road this morning after a soaking squall had passed. It stopped on the blacktop and did a dozen push-ups before moving on. Later, two black snakes rose like candelabras from the grass on the edge of a clay road, weaving around each other’s rippling bodies until, except for two heads looking at each other, they were one. Turtles were everywhere. It would seem that there is something about the month of May that animates reptilian emotions.

  By afternoon, pollen gilded the sun and the heat had driven the moisture back into the clouds. Once again red dirt rose behind passing cars and clung to the leaves of the roadside trees. I drove past an old white man wearing a straw hat and baggy pants. He hobbled on crutches down the shady side of the road next to a lemon-colored pointer bitch with sagging gray teats. They turned to look at me. In the mirror I saw a pair of quail flush out of the ditch in front of them; the bitch pointed and the man touched her head. I walked three miles around the big field at sunset, walking like a child dreaming, gliding over the ineffable beauty of the earth. A bobwhite with a purple face ducked into a tangle of dewberries. My dog returned shortly.

  The year-old pine trees waved golden candles caught in front of a falling sun, golden tassels waving atop thin green bodies. Hundreds of grasshoppers flushed ahead of me like coveys of miniature quail. The wings of a red-tailed hawk skulled the wind. Quail whistled in the folds of Dead Man’s field. Turkeys hobnobbed through the hardwoods. Spring is for dreaming, fall for killing.

  That night, the moonlight was suddenly fractured by clouds; a light more venerable than the sun’s. Its elfish glow bathed the fields ahead of the storm advancing from the west. Rain came like a migration of gray birds. Thunder shook the windows, which hummed; the bed moved a little. I remembered a girl who carried a flying squirrel in her pocket to school. In the morning there were thousands of frogs, frogs everywhere: tree frogs, cricket frogs, chorus frogs, squirrel frogs, barking frogs, gopher frogs. I pulled an oak toad out of the swimming pool, observed the pulsating innards of a miniature green frog through the windowpane, drove over flat frogs on the blacktop. There were bullfrogs in the toilet bowls, the shower, the sink, anywhere it was damp. This was the year of the frog.

  Baby wood ducks free-fell into the pond and swam away. Crows bathed and cawed. The pond became a parking lot. Steam rose from the swamps in sheets. Sap rose by bucketfuls into the trees, whose tops woke every morning misty with fog. Through the coppery sounds of darkness I heard the screams of a nighthawk, the screams of a woman, the screams of dementia.

  “For whom are those snakes that whistle on your heads?” cried the poet.

  Flocks of white cattle egrets (Bubulcus ibis) visit us in the spring and summer, clouds of thin birds with long, yellow bills and darting, black eyes, clouds that break up and fall to earth like white pillowcases, modest in stature but predators who know their business. They hunt the fields for insects and mice, stalk the wet-weather ponds, gorge on tadpoles and lizards, run after the tractor bobbing their heads like apples in water, trill their throat feathers, dismember their prey, kill, fight off the competition, and, when crowded, swallow living things. While plowing one spring I separated a quail from her brood. The fledglings, hardly larger than bumblebees, scurried into the tall grass while their mother drew me away, stumbling here and there in front of the tractor, dropping her wings, pulling her vision of danger farther and farther from her young; behind me the cattle birds fanned out; the baby quail squealed until one by one they were discovered, and then there were none. Bill carries his revolver on the tractor and in the spring shoots at white birds; years later, the flocks recognize the farm, the tractor, and the sting of ratshot, and don’t drop in as often.

  Red beacons advertise the arrival of a hundred or more red-winged blackbirds into the pale green branches of the water oak next to my bird feeder. Aggressive inside their weight class, red-wings live on the muscle, and in each other’s faces, bullying all potential competition except the Brewer’s blackbird, an evil-looking bit of business mantled in purple with a long triangular beak and a disposition for eating lizards. Brewer’s blackbirds stare at the sun through custard-colored eyes, expecting trouble from every cloud. Down the line and far too timid to claim a piece of the feeder is the northern cardinal, an attentive gentleman who usually invites his mate along. At the bottom of the pecking order lives the bland-looking field sparrow, who has nothing to say about anything.

  We all crouch at passing shadows, but birds look good doing it; stylized renditions of Audubon eyes. Predation from above still lives in the memory of man. A merlin once took position for a while in a dead tree near the feeder, harassing the songbirds more by its immobility than its infrequent stoops. I saw it hit a robin, who got away with a collar of featherless pink skin as a reminder of their meeting. The merlin chased a red-winged blackbird into the window in front of my desk, startling me and breaking the blackbird’s head. The blackbird didn’t die but recuperated under the building, returning to the feeder daily for weeks, bald-headed and cross-beaked from the impact, looking like a particularly odd version of scissors’ hands.

  On a blustery June evening brilliant with white clouds and sun, I flushed a single bobwhite quail from under a planted pine tree, a tree as tall and delicate as a young girl. High in the sky the wind blew with a warm ferocity, and from the branches of a solitary oak a Cooper’s hawk rose from her nest and met the quail head-on. Feathers streamed back to me, soft, lovely feathers unendurably light on the wind.

  All the dark birds but one

  rush from the river

  leaving only the stillness of their language

  —Yaqui Indian

  Summer

  I

  Bobwhite quail are small, succulent, and randy, the hen a tender morsel of femininity with a heart rate so high that warmly nestled in my hand the bird conjures the bewitching memory of a young girl’s breast.

  Someone once said, “A hen is merely the egg’s way of making another egg.” The book says that in terms of quail family-planning, the time span from romance to hatching is roughly fifty days: ten days for courting and building a nest, seventeen days for laying, and twenty-three for incubating.

  In April the birds mate, the grass looks blue, the corn casts sh
ort shadows, and the blooming dogwoods underline the temporary fragility of the spring forest. Two months later, when the hatchlings abandon the warm, liquid safety of their eggs, the heat is that of a boiler room, the underbrush bursting, and the earth swollen from passing rains. The smell of a Southern summer benumbs me in its lustfulness. Rising from the forest floor like colorless fog, it exhales the lascivious breath of all the women I’ve ever dreamed of possessing.

  The incubating duties of bobwhite quail do not rest altogether on the maternal instincts of the hens; the males, like their modern human counterparts, get involved. The hub of the couple’s world for almost two months is the nest, which remains unattended until the hen has finished laying an average of fourteen eggs at a rate of one a day. If the nest is destroyed the couple starts over, but the clutch grows smaller, following a pattern of diminishing returns. The incubating process begins when the last egg is laid, a three-week tour of duty that involves sitting and protecting the nest as well as turning the clutch over once a day to keep the embryos from adhering to the egg membrane. Eggs discharge carbon dioxide, which is not conducive to healthy embryos, so by nudging them the hens also circulate air through the nest. The nest is left untended during the couple’s meals. Berries are favored at that time of year for their availability and high sugar content. If the hen is killed, or for any reason abandons the nest—which happens often, particularly early on in the incubation—the male takes over the sitting chores and later the education of the hatchlings.